Infographic: The SEO Basics You Can’t Afford to Ignore

When I first started writing blog posts, I knew next to nothing about SEO. I’d write headlines just because I liked the sound of them, and I had no concept of keyword selection. If I used internal linking, it was a happy accident.

According to a study by Small Business Trends, that’s not uncommon. Forty-five percent of small businesses aren’t sure what SEO means, yet 98 percent think being found on Google is important. With so many brands and publishers creating content, it’s imperative to make sure your work appears close to the top of relevant searches.

Thankfully, you don’t have to do it alone. Tools like Google AdWords keyword planner and Moz’s Keyword Explorer help users make sure you’re getting the most out of your keywords. WordPress offers the Yoast SEO plugin to help maximize the SEO potential of each blog post or infographic you publish, as we do here on The Content Strategist.

I’m currently doing a content audit for Contently’s The Freelancer blog, so making sure that our SEO is amplified is top of mind. (All of these internal links aren’t here by accident.) We used Moz to find out which keywords were most popular and most important to our articles, and we’re now confirming that every keyword appears in SEO sweet spots like meta descriptions, URLs, and subheadings. And let’s not forget about that pesky image alt text that is so easy to overlook.

Factors like word count, tags, and well-timed social media posts that boost SEO will become second nature once you get used to inputting them day after day. For more information on how to make the most of your keywords, check out the infographic below created by To the Web.